454: How Ghostery Is Deploying AI in the Fight Against Ad Trackers

Did you know that everytime you visit a website, there are hundreds of companies such as Google, Facebook that are tracking your online behavior and a building a profile about you? Even if you are not being served adverts, many retailers often track your web behavior so it knows what products to promote to you. Sometimes, this tracking oversteps the mark and enters a creepy territory. When I heard how Edward Snowden-endorsed a service called Ghostery, I felt compelled to find out more.

Ghostery is the first browser extension that makes your web browsing experience faster, cleaner and safer by detecting and blocking thousands of third-party data-tracking technologies – putting control of their own data back into consumers’ hands. Launched in 2009, Ghostery has more than seven million monthly active users who access the tool via the free apps or browser extensions. With its intuitive user interface, the company enables average internet users to protect their privacy by default, while expert users benefit from a broad set of features and settings.

I invited Jeremy Tillman, director of product at Ghostery, onto the show to chat about online privacy. Jeremy calls himself a recovering engineer who cast aside his TI-86 to become an entrepreneur, digital strategist, and product manager. As a practitioner of the Lean Startup and Scrum methodologies, he has committed himself to a philosophy that places user discovery, early testing, iterative improvement, and continuous deployment at the center of product development.

Since joining Ghostery in October of 2014 as its Director of Product he has worked diligently on its consumer and enterprise products. On today’s podcast, we discuss how retailers are using ad trackers at the expense of consumers and their privacy. We also highlight how Ghostery makes it easy for the average user to protect themselves from being tracked online preemptively.